New Look

Not sure I like it, but design isn't really my greatest talent. I've been contemplating moving to Wordpress, but I'm too lazy and busy to deal with it right now, so I'm experimenting here a little. I wanted to preserve the theatrical theme (I still feel like I'm role playing) and color scheme. Don't be surprised if things change again

Funny

After reading about A Post-Academic in NYC's recent encounters with the dean at the place that could suck her like a giant vacuum back into academe, I was reminded of a certain undergrad prof I had who HATED university administrators with a vengeance. How did ze deal with these negative feelings without getting fired? Ze had pet snakes. The snakes ate live mice. Undergrad Prof named these mice before putting them into the snakes' cages ... after university administrators.

Nice, huh? Sorry about the light posting lately. I suppose I could just post random shit. Sometimes I do that anyway! But ... well, just stay tuned. Hopefully, the number of things I both want to blog about and can blog about will get back to normal soon.

Via

Who Said Crickets Were Boring?

Where is everybody? I'm not the only one whose posting has been light lately ...

At least he crickets have something to say:

Through the Looking Glass

Blogging, we commonly presume, carries with it a veracity similar to autobiography. Whether bloggers use real names, totally anonymous pseudonyms, or pseudonyms openly linked to real people, we attribute a subjective truth, at the very least, to the lives bloggers appear to represent.

Why is this? A persona is not a person, no matter how much or how little correlation exists, or that readers think exists.

At least with other kinds of writing, we respect distinctions: An autobiography is not the same as an autobiographical novel, which is not the same as a "regular" novel merely informed by the author's experiences. Nor, again, is a "regular" novel the same as an epistolary novel, with its deliberate gesture towards "real" people telling a "real" story through "their own" writings.

But we assume blogs are like diaries. Whether we know the authors as real people, think we know them, or have utterly no idea who they are, we read each entry believing its contents more like autobiography than fiction.  Yet, it is a persona, not a person, that speaks to us, a digital construction of an identity that develops and evolves with each new post.

Some graduate student has probably already written a dissertation entitled Blogging, Baudrillard, and Barthes: Authorial Simulacra and the Creation of Hyperreal Identities in Online Communities.

Barf. Don't worry. I won't take that any further. But, just as a thought experiment, consider the following:

What if you were to find out that "recent Ph.D." didn't have a Ph.D., didn't work at a think tank or as a secretary, and had never even gone to graduate school? What if "After Academe" were a work of fiction, invented by a stay-at-home mom who had once entertained aspirations of going to graduate school and becoming a professor and wanted to explore the "road not taken" as a means of finding consolation for her choices? She had considered writing a novel but found the immediacy and flexibility of blogging more appealing. Her husband has an important position at a think tank, and she sometimes helps out with administrative tasks.

What if you were to find out "recent Ph.D." was actually a tenured professor who, while always advising his undergraduates NOT to go to graduate school, saw his graduate students year after year -- many of them very talented and committed -- trying and failing repeatedly to get jobs, lingering on in the department as adjuncts? What if he felt terrible about this situation but couldn't speak openly about reforming the department, despite tenure, without being ostracized by other faculty and administrators? What if graduate students wouldn't listen when he told them to walk away because, for them, his position undermined his ethos, making them feel as if he simply thought they weren't good enough, a feeling that only reinforced their determination to prove him wrong? What if "After Academe" were a work of creative nonfiction this professor hoped would convince graduate students and other recent Ph.D.s, whom he could not otherwise reach, that they had other options? What if a former graduate student of his was now working at a think tank?


Of course, you can believe whatever you want to believe, but sometimes readers do raise questions about the real identity of "recent Ph.D." My answer is this: I am as "real" as you want me to be. And the "book" you ask about ... why would you treat it any differently than the blog? If I wrote a book, it would have to fit in a genre: autobiography, creative nonfiction, novel. I'd be an "author" and I'd "die" when you read my "text." Blogging is its own genre, but it can freely incorporate any number of others. And since a blog only ever is, as a text, incomplete, the author/persona retains an active role, disembodied but not dead.

What if "recent Ph.D." is just a highly imaginative, clever, and creative undergraduate, contemplating graduate school but discouraged by what ze has heard? Ze would be just as happy, happier even, if ze could become a famous writer, inventing new literary forms, reaching wider audiences, cultivating "art for art's sake," but for now, ze finds hirself interning at a think tank, bored and overdosing on critical theory.

Won't you follow me through the looking glass? How much of me is you and vice versa?

Via

Three Blogs for 2012 (and Some Dead Turkeys and a Rat, Too)

I have a million things on my mind but few fit for expression here. I don't feel like doing a banal New Year's "Goodbye 2011, Hello 2012" post. The rest of the blog already tells the 2011 story. Go back and read the posts you missed if you want a retrospective. And 2012 is still anybody's guess. I also tried to do an entertaining review of Christmas dinner with the Tea Party Branch of the Family of Peaches, but I ended up on an angry vegan rampage with nothing to show for it but pictures of factory farmed turkeys (Ha! You get those anyway!):

But lest I further spoil your appetite and until I come upon thoughts of my own more fit for blogging, go check out, if you haven't already, new postacademic blogs by:

Currer Bell at Project Reinvention 2012 and WTF have I done with my life at Unemployed PhD for Hire. Both add to the growing chorus of academics -- for a host of excellent reasons -- who are beginning to walk away.

Also, I stumbled on Notes from Babel today, which I recommend visiting if you love words like I do. Although the author is a conservative and the political posts are distasteful (yet thoughtful), the language posts illustrate that just because we might disagree about what's good policy doesn't mean we can't wholeheartedly agree about what's good English. I was poking around the Internet to see if someone else might have an explanation for why my brain dead, 5:00 PM self found the phrase "yeoman's work" out of place in a Think Tank "annual report," and this post nails it. Although the author appears to be migrating here (and it is unclear if he will continue writing about language), go read this post and this post at the very least.What was it 100 Reasons NOT to Go to Graduate School said waaaaaaaay back at the beginning about the smart people being somewhere else?

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And, well, this is just a cute little something in case you need something to make yourself feel better about eating dead turkeys:

Another Postacademic Blog

While the author of Songwriters on Process does not expressly identify himself as a postacademic, he is, in fact, just that. Here's someone with a Ph.D. in English, someone who actually had a tenure-track job which he left several years ago, someone who currently has a nonacademic job he likes that lets him use skills he developed as an academic, and a blog where he writes about the art of writing. What more could a former English prof, who gave up academe to live in a vibrant city and make a decent income, ask for?

So, go on over there and check out the blog. The substance of the blog posts may not be of special interest to postacademics who aren't into music or songwriting, but, given the memes of encouragement and looking ahead that have been going around lately, it might be valuable to take a peek into the life of someone who's a few years ahead of us in this postacademic adventure. Here's someone who left academe gladly and willingly. Even though he was "one of the lucky ones" like Amanda Kraus with a tenure-track job, he saw through the bullshit and got the hell out. Here's someone who is now a happy and successful postacademic. In a few years -- hopefully sooner! (and some of us already!!) -- we will be, too.

fucken facebook

Every now and then, I get a cluster of hits from somewhere on fucken facebook because one of you crazy readers linked to some post or other.

I have expressed my loathing for facebook before and the lemming-like behavior it seems to generate among otherwise intelligent and/or decent people.

While I am mildly curious who is linking to me, I am not curious enough to join to find out. Grow a pair and leave a comment already!

This Morning's Bagel Brought to You by the Koch Brothers

This morning. I am here, my table sandwiched in between CPAC and Concerned Women for America (if you're not already familiar, beware before Googling -- you might lose your breakfast). I'm handing out Think Tank propaganda to Tea Party zealots and collecting email addresses.

They tell me things, these people:

"I like your pamphlets. They're nice and short. I'm too lazy to read books." (Seriosly, fer realz, somebody said that.)

"What great, nicely organized little booklets. There's just 10 points to remember on every issue. Now that's something I can handle! Nice and simple."

"Those Occupy Wall Street wackos. Somebody should just send in a bunch of red necks to beat the snot out of them." (This morning, after some traffic disrupting protests last night that ended rather badly.)

"Higher education reform. Huh. I should read that one. It's like, education is all liberal and all and then the cost has gone up three times the rate of inflation. Damned liberals. Such hypocrites. They talk about equality, but they just want to take our money and spend it to indoctrinate our children." (No, not kidding, and I do hope that individual actually reads that particular pamphlet. Because, while. I disagree with a lot of Think Tank's ideas on education reform -- actually, not what my office even works on, anyway -- they're not as completely idiotic as this person. I mean, you could have an argument about policy differences. You wouldn't just be trying to refute uninformed nonsense. And there's even a bit of common ground, like the idea that there should be greater transparency concerning tuition and costs so that students would know that a great deal of their increasingly borrowed tuition is, increasingly, NOT funding instruction. Or that we should increase emphasis on instruction and reduce barriers to entry ... but I digress.)

"Oh, right, we've heard of Think Tank. The black person in our church gave us some of your materials." (Note use of the article "the," along with the fact that it was significant, apparently, to point this out to a perfect stranger. Did this person remember Think Tank because she read the materials or because they were handed to her by a black person? This event, like others I've blogged about, is overwhelmingly white. Despite the presence of Herman Cain, I can count on one hand the number of people of color who have passed by my table. Why? That is a rhetorical question. Perhaps Herman Cain would like to explain why his party has such low appeal among minorities. Does anyone know if he already has?)

"Global warming, what a hoax! Those scientists are ripping us off, taking all that grant money to study something that's so obviously false. And destroying business and jobs while they're at it! We need to shut that racket down now." (This after recent research further CONFIRMING climate change despite its Koch brothers funding.)

I could go on and on ...

So, yeah, there are days when I find myself questioning the integrity of working where I do, attending events such as these, even as the proverbial fly on the wall, when my complimentary morning bagel and coffee are provided courtesy of the Koch brothers' funding of an event that does much more to further their agenda than that, for them, ill-fated climate study.

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But then, I go read a blog post over at Roxie's World, perhaps the best yet in their ongoing series Excellence Without Money, that describes the plight of adjuncts at their institution.

And I am reassured. At least here in Think Tank Land you know what people stand for. You may not agree with them. But at least you know what's what. At least when you're dealing with the Koch brothers and their ilk, you don't falsely believe you are dealing with Greenpeace.

And that's sort of how I feel about academe these days, that a culture (and people with power in it) valued me, I thought, for one set of things -- originality, passion, insight, creativity, contributions to the field -- and instead, as it turns out, my true value was as another -- as a warm body willing to show up and teach for cheap. See comment by Anonymous 1:27 here. (That was me, FYI. I've stopped commenting under my Blogger name there because a troll tracked me here and was harassing me by email.)

At least if you're going to be negotiating your position in the world against market forces, you ought to know how they operate. And I didn't. And a lot of graduate students still don't. And that the truth is willfully hidden from them through job market and professionalization rhetoric, even by well-meaning professors, is an egregious wrong.

I remain bitter, and the irony is not lost on me that I am now working for the very groups that, if they have their way, will further push universities down the path of adjunctification and for-profit-ization.

At least I know who I'm dealing with and where I stand.

Bar Blogging

It is a Tuezday night, and here I find myself sipping a glass of wine in a hotel bar in Another City.

There isn't really a point to this post other than I don't have anyone to talk to and can't sleep.

Dear post-academic blogger friends! Wish you were here ... Oh well.

So what am I doing here? Well, I could spin you a tale about running away. About cashing out my bank account and catching a plane to someplace far away and fun. About hitchhiking 500 miles from home out of sheer boredom. About some bizarre and wild party that took a strange turn down a wrong road ... About smuggling drugs. About political scandals.

Of course, none of this is true. I'm traveling for work. Think Tank is hosting an event to "educate" interested parties about An Issue. I'm here to make copies and set up PowerPoints and conference phone lines and make sure lunch gets served on time, but I have nothing to complain about really. Dinner was good. And I learned that a former president of this organization, also a guest at dinner, thinks that Rick Perry is too stupid to be president, despite all the money he's still bringing in. At least we can agree on something.

What is it that Dr. Seuss says about "all the places you will go and the people you will meet"? What would Bill Cronon say about the company I keep?

Hey, I'm just a fly on the wall."I'm nobody! Who are you?"

So here I still am at the bar. I've effectively killed a half hour, but I'm still not tired. I have a history of getting into trouble (of a good kind) when bored. Maybe I'll tell you about it sometime. And the night is still young ... but I'm not so young anymore. Probably I will just sit here and have another drink and catch up on what all of you out there have been saying these last few days.

Misconceptions

In case you've missed it, over at 100 Reasons NOT to Go to Graduate School, there's a superfantastic shitfest going on in the comments to this post. I wasn't going to get involved, but the Honey Badger summoned me (just go read the comments) to rebut something and I couldn't resist. What occurred to me -- as I went blathering on in comments of my own -- was that, while the academic job market may have a fair lot of myths surrounding it, there are also a lot of myths and misconceptions that academics have about nonacademic work and vice versa.

The hostility and acrimony expressed in those comments say more about what academe does to people than anything else. On the one hand, you have the people who have gotten out (either before or after grad school) who try to convince themselves they made the right choice but still harbor some regret and a lot of insecurity. On the other hand, you have people committed to getting the Ph.D. and/or who now find themselves stuck on the adjunct track (with or without degree) and need to convince themselves they're happy and have settled for the lesser of two evils -- even though they may have tried and tried to get out! The nonacademics piss on the academics for being stupid losers who can't get their lives together, and the academics piss on the nonacademics for being superficial, money-motivated jerks who never belonged in academe to begin with.

It's sad, really, that the conversations degenerate like this. Because the issue we should be focusing on is Academe itself. Because ... really? We need educated citizens if democracy is going to function properly. The current system is destroying the next generation of faculty while charging students more and more every year. If we can't have a rational conversation about what's wrong with academe without flinging poo at each other, we're never going to get to the point of talking about solutions.

So. I've digressed a bit already. What I wanted to say is that there are some common misconceptions about nonacademic work among academics (and would-be academics) that prevent them from both accurately assessing their current situation and figuring out how to get out -- if getting out is what they want to do.

Misconception #1: There's a secret "inside track" for all the good jobs. If you're not on it, you'll forever be stuck in retail or restaurant work.
While it's absolutely true that networking helps and that your connections may give you access to jobs unavailable to others, it's also true that many people do gt interviews and jobs just from answering job ads. Personally, I'm terrible at networking. It's something I really need to work on, but, while I've seen people over the last few months come and go because of their connections, I got all of my interviews and this job by answering an ad. At the same time, this so-called "inside track" is one people work hard at creating for themselves. There's nothing magical about it. It's accessible, but you have to take the initiative.

Misconception #2: All nonacademic jobs are boring. Adjuncting isn't great, but it beats spending the rest of your life in a cubicle as a corporate slave.
I don't even really have a response for this other than maybe ... grow up? If you're happy enough adjuncting, then keep on adjuncting. I'll be the first to point out your complicity with the system, but I'll also be the last to tell you to quit -- if you're really satisfied, that is. But don't cheat yourself by using the "boring" excuse to avoid exploring other kinds of work. Sure, there are plenty of corporate, cubicle jobs out there, but there are also plenty of non-corporate, non-cubicle jobs. Even the corporate, cubicle ones are probably not in practice what you imagine them to be in theory. Broaden your horizons.

Misconception #3: The economy is bad everywhere. Other industries treat their workers poorly. Adjuncts should be glad to have any job at all, especially if they like what they're doing at least a little.
It's true that the economy is bad and that other industries treat their workers poorly and that -- to a certain extent, with almost 10% of the population unemployed - a job is a job is a job. But looking at the issue in these terms sidesteps some of the problems unique to academe. The trend towards casualization began several decades ago (as the "I told you so" tenure-track types are fond of saying ... except not to their bright-eyed, bushy-tailed undergrads). It's been exacerbated by the recession and certainly mirrors problems we're seeing elsewhere in the economy, but the "market" for jobs in academe is grossly distorted in ways it is not in other industries. Academe has figured out that it needs workers and that a great many people will work for far less than they are worth -- a great many people who could be doing other things but believe they are destined for Living the Life of the Mind. Class is a factor, too, for many. You may be on food stamps, but, as faculty, you're middle-class in a way that your uncle Joe the Plumber never will be, even if he earns 10 times your salary. I'm sympathetic to this position, but, on the other hand, if your work as a teacher and researcher has so much more "class" value than being a plumber does, why aren't you getting paid accordingly? In my book, that's Catch-22: You like what you do but that's how you're getting screwed. And your exploiters know it, and that's why they're continuing to exploit you. Do you really like adjuncting THAT much? Are you SURE you wouldn't like being a plumber even a little bit ... or maybe a secretary?

Misconception #4: I don't really like adjuncting that much, but all my efforts to find another kind of job have failed. Nobody wants to hire someone with an M.A. or Ph.D. in the humanities.
As I understand it from reading around the blogosphere and talking to people, there is a lot of geographic variability here. If you're someplace that's been particularly hard hit by the recession, the odds of you finding even a secretary job like mine are probably much lower. You might want to consider relocating, if that's an option. If geography isn't your problem, take a good, hard look at the kinds of materials you're sending out and the kinds of jobs you're applying for. I've said before but I'll say again, I didn't start getting responses until I started marketing myself as a career changer. It puts you in a different category in the minds of those doing the hiring and makes you eligible for positions above the entry level, even if you have not worked in those particular occupations before.

Misconception #5: The nonacademic world doesn't have anything to offer me. I'm smart and talented, and my gifts would be wasted outside academe. I'm not really happy with what academe has to offer me, but I'd be even more unhappy outside academe.
This is a narcissistic variation of #2. No wonder you're unhappy. Really, the nonacademic world doesn't have anything to offer YOU? No wonder nobody is calling you back about those applications. It's not about what they have to offer you but the opposite -- what you have to offer them. They don't want your narcissism and arrogance. They don't want someone who thinks they're too good for the job they're applying for ... or the company or the industry. They want someone who not only has smarts and talents but is willing to creatively use those smarts and talents to DO something productive within the organization. If you're willing to use your smarts and talents creatively and positively, they won't be wasted, and you won't feel like you're wasting your time.

If you fall prey to these misconceptions, you will be more like the Slowass Sloth than the Crazy Nastyass Honey Badger:

Ponderable

More people visit this blog in a day than will probably ever "visit" any of my academic publications in the course of my lifetime.

Should We Care About Spelling and Grammar Mistakes in the Blogosphere?

Just wondering what others think. I usually try to be careful and proofread before I post, but I wrote the third post yesterday hastily, just as I was about to leave work. I just wanted to skedaddle and go home, but the mistakes I discovered when reading over it today (now corrected) grated on my brain like nails on a chalkboard. Does anyone else notice and/or care about such things? Do you go back and correct mistakes in your posts? Should blogs be held to a different standard than other kinds of writing?